For years now, I’ve been writing about how often websites are infected by hackers stealing their CMS (WordPress, Joomla, etc.), FTP or hosting account login credentials.

I know that some of our competitors roll their eyes whenever we help someone in a forum seeking help with an infected website and we determine that their site was compromised due to stolen login credentials. However, our experience shows this to be a widely used method by today’s cybercriminals.

Here is a link to an article about how this malware works: http://vinsula.com/hunting-down-ftp-password-stealer-malware-with-vinsula-execution-engine/

In the article you’ll see how this malware works. It seeks certain files on your local computer and sends them to the hackers CnC server (Command ‘n Control server). You’ll see in that article that it also seeks out certain anti-virus programs and either disables them or reconfigures them.

One other interesting point of this article is how they obtained the malware – via an infected email. You have to be suspicious of all emails. We constantly see one that looks like it’s from LinkedIn, but if you hover over the link to see their profile before accepting their invitation to connect, you’ll see it does not go to www.linkedin.com. This is a very cleverly crafted email designed to infect the unsuspecting recipient.

Please share this others. The more knowledge shared about how hackers (cybercriminals) work the better and safer we’ll all be. Have any incidents like this to share? Let me know…

Other sites we were asked to help with were also showing these domains in their Google Diagnostics:

daobrains.info/

safetyshareonline.com/

goslimscan.com/

goscansome.com/

globalsecurityscans.com/

Our scanners were detecting suspicious obfuscated javascript on the sites we were helping with, but it appeared to only be setting cookies to expire the following day. The obfuscated javascript was this:

Which deobfuscated looks like:

sessionid=39128605A531; path=/; expires=Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:42:32 GMT

We found similar code with various names for the “var” part (replacing oigmlob) above in the obfuscated code. Other names were:

dtxzidl

bmno

wcdg

tpet

stqfpbc

meuhgor

In addition, we also saw various combinations of the hexidecimal numbers to replace the actual letters. For instance, instead of pa\x74h=/\x3b ex\x70ir\x65s we found these as well:

p\x61th=/\x3b exp\x69r\x65s

p\x61\x74h=/\x3b \x65x\x70i\x72es

p\x61t\x68=/\x3b expi\x72e\x73

All of these deobfuscate to: path=/; expires

One common theme was the hosting providers. Wouldn’t you know that a day after we blog about how wrongly accused many hosting providers are for the gumblar, martuz and iframe infections that they actually become the target.

It appears that these recent infections are a server issue and not just a specific website on a shared server. How the server became infected is purely speculation. Could it have been from one set of compromised FTP credentials that was able to infect the server and then control other sites as well? Could it have been SQL injection for one site that then gave the attackers a method to start a process on the server thereby controlling all the websites on that server?

Who knows. At this point all we do know is that this does affect all the websites on infected servers.

How do we know that?

We created a program for situations like this. It grabs a list of all the websites for a specific IP address and starts checking them. On some IP addresses 91% of the websites were showing the obfuscated cookie code from above. Our thought is that since this is an “on again – off again” type of infection, the other 9% were dormant when our program scanned those sites.

Another interesting observation was that for a specific IP address, each website showed the exact same obfuscated code. While websites on different IP addresses had similar obfuscated code with the slight variations mentioned previously.

The first step in this “drive-by” infection was to set a cookie on the visitor’s PC. Then if that same visitor came back within the expiration period of the cookie (24 hours), this would be delivered to their browser:

Which essentially does a Meta tag redirect. The above deobfuscates to:

We did see some of the other domains mentioned earlier in place of safetyshareonline.com and the goscansoon.com.

The whole purpose of this attack is to infect the PCs of visitor’s to these websites. This is done with this bit of social engineering code:

This code uses some fake graphics (okay the graphics are real, but they’re not the “official” graphics of Microsoft) in an attempt to trick the visitor into believing they have a virus. The code starts by checking to see if the operating system on the visitor’s PC is Microsoft’s Vista. If it is, it displays “Vista” looking graphics. If not Vista, then it assumes Windows XP and shows different graphics.

No matter who you are or what operating system and browser you have, this code shows a window that looks like a “Windows Security Center” window and it informs you that:

“Virus (I-Worm.Trojan.b) was found on your computer! Click OK to install System Security Antivirus.” If you select “OK” from their screen it will download their “antivirus”.

If you cancel, a new alert is displayed with this message:

“Windows Security Center recommends you to install System Security Antivirus.”

If you cancel that, it will display again.

One more cancel gets you to this message:

“Your computer remains infected by viruses! They can cause data loss and file damages and need to be cured as soon as possible. Return to System Security and download it to secure your PC”

This is some very elaborate scheming by hackers and cybercriminals just to get visitors to download their “mother lode of infectious code”, but it will probably work on many people.

We decided to show the code here, although the code is inserted graphic files, so that if your website starts being tagged as suspicious by Google with some of the domains listed here, and you get the “This site may harm your computer” moniker, you can compare this code to some of the code you might see in your site and have a better understanding of what is going on.

What To Do

First you need to contact your hosting provider. Have them read this blog post so they can also better understand what’s going on.

Have them check at the server level for unusual processes running on the server. If you’d like, have them contact us and we can help them diagnose this further. We can show them the other websites on your server that are also infected with the exact same code.

At this point we still don’t know how the server gets infected. Be prudent and scan your PCs with a different anti-virus than what you’re currently using. Why? Because if you are infected and you have anti-virus already installed, then it’s obvious that the virus knows how to evade detection of your current security.

We’ve had good success with AVG, Avast or Avira. If you already have one of those installed, then use one of the others. You need to use something different. Scan and clean all PCs with FTP access to your site.

Then change FTP passwords on all of your accounts.

This will have to be done as soon as you start seeing these infections as it may take some time to fully investigate and remediate – so don’t be late (sorry, it’s been a long few days).

Post comments below if you’ve been infected by this or know someone who has.

Thank you.

Friday July 24, 2009 update: We worked with a couple different hosting providers who had servers infected with this and it appears the way these malscripts are injected into the the webpages is through a process on the server. The cybercriminals have cleverly named this process “crontab” however this process runs under the user name “nobody” typically the same user name that Apache (or httpd) runs as.

The file that executes this process is remotely deleted by the cybercriminals controlling it so it just runs in memory. Once the server is rebooted, the process disappears and doesn’t appear to return. The hosting providers also mentioned implementing suPHP as an aid to blocking this from happening again.

This is quite clever as how many times does a shared server really get rebooted? Probably not very often unless there’s a reason to shut-down numerous (hundreds?) websites all at once.

A report released on July 14, 2009 states that “Several successive and massive malware outbreaks caused a spike in malware that was undetected by major AV engines.”

In Commtouch’s Q2 Report available here , which covers the analysis of over 2 billion emails and Internet transactions, they also claim:

“Business” was the website category most infected with malware

An average of 376,000 new zombies were activated each day with malicious intent

Amir Lev, Chief Technology Officer of Commtouch said that for the last 18 months anti-virus (AV) engines used many generic signatures, which were effective at blocking malware. However, malware writers and distributors introduced new variants which are immune to these generic signatures.

This time period coincides with the infection of 1,000s of websites with gumblar, martuz and iframe malscripts which then received Google’s moniker of “This site may harm your computer.”

The Blame Game

Answering many, many blog and forum postings from disgruntled website owners and developers who’ve been the victim of these recent gumblar, martuz and iframe infections, it’s been our experience that quite often the thought process of the victimized website owner follows this path:

The website owner or webmaster receives an email from Google notifying them that their site is infectious. Google rarely (if ever) is wrong so they immediately slap all SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) with the “This site may harm your computer” label thereby stopping all traffic dead in it’s tracks.

Cautiously the site owner or webmaster will try to view the site. They don’t want to become infected from their own site, but their curiosity is overwhelming. They typically don’t see anything malicious.

“How do I find and clean this?” Often these people will post questions on sites like Google’s Webmaster Forums or www.badwarebusters.org or some other favorite online watering hole.

Then their focus turns to, “Who’s to Blame?”

The feeling of many site owners is one of “I’ve been violated and I need to blame someone.”

When hacking victims get to “Who’s to blame”, they quite often turn their attention to their hosting provider. Many times the blogs and forums are filled with postings where people blame even some of the largest hosting providers. Site owners want to instantly spend the time and money to move their website to a different hosting provider where they’ll once again feel safe and secure.

All because they feel it’s the hosting provider’s fault their site, or sites, were hacked.

The site owner or developer will call the hosting provider looking for assistance from their technical staff and quite frequently, they can’t find the obfuscated malscript buried deep inside some harmless HTML code either. Many times the website has been blocked by various anti-virus programs, Google’s search results and sometimes even corporate website filters for days or weeks before the issue is resolved.

Even if the site owner goes through the trouble of moving to a new hosting provider, with these recent infections, their site will just get hacked again and again.

Then who’s to blame? The new hosting provider? How many more hosting provider’s will the site owner move to until they finally find one that gives them that safe and secure feeling?

Many site owner’s want the hosting provider to take responsibility and clean their site. After all, they’re paying their $5 – $10 per month so the hosting provider should take responsibility and the spend the time to clean the infectious website, right? No matter how many times the site gets re-infected.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but, hosting providers had nothing to do with websites getting hacked with the recent gumblar, martuz or iframe injections. It was anyone’s fault but theirs.

It could be the site owner’s fault, or the anti-virus company’s fault, or Microsoft’s fault, or the fault of the company that wrote the FTP software being used.

It was almost anyone’s fault – except that of the hosting provider.

Let me explain.

You see, with all the malware that went undetected by these generic signatures, thousands of PCs were compromised. According to the Commtouch report referenced above, 376,000 new zombies per day.

You could blame Microsoft, however, the Commtouch report also shows an increase in the amount of Mac malware as well. Besides, blaming Microsoft is so 2,000 late.

These recent website infections came from viruses on the PCs of people who have FTP access to websites.

OMG!

Does that mean it could be the fault of the website owners, developers and webmasters?

It might, rabbit, it might.

These recent undetectable viruses steal FTP credentials – usernames and passwords. These viruses search through the files of popular FTP software looking for the file with the stored FTP credentials. These viruses also record keystrokes so when an infected PC is used to type in the FTP credentials, they get stolen. As another point of attack the viruses also “sniff” FTP traffic. Since FTP transmits all data in plain text, it’s easy for a sniffer to see the username and password in the FTP data stream and steal it. We even did a video to show how easy it is to sniff FTP traffic. It’s so easy that some people use a sniffer on their own FTP traffic if they forgot their stored password. Here’s our video.

Virus writers are incredibly smart and this round of malware proves it.

Once the virus has the FTP credentials it sends them to the server of a cybercriminal. This server is configured to login to the website as a valid user, inject it’s infectious code and move on to the next site.

Who’s to Blame?

How many websites did you visit that displayed some type of ad? Did you know that many ad networks have served up infectious ads – unknowingly of course, but nonetheless, the ads could have infected many visitors.

How many websites did you visit that displayed Flash intro’s or allowed you to view an Adobe Acrobat file (pdf)? Adobe had a few vulnerabilities in their software, that were exploited during and prior to this time period. Combine a vulnerability in files so widely used with the ineffective generic anti-virus signatures, and there’s another source to blame. Maybe two new sources – the AV companies and Adobe.

Did you update your Adobe products as soon as the update was available?

If not, then there’s another person to blame – you.

Could the companies that wrote the FTP software used, maybe have encrypted the stored usernames and passwords so that it wasn’t quite so easy to find and steal the FTP credentials? There’s anothe source to blame.

Maybe if so many people didn’t use their PCs with full administrator rights, there wouldn’t be such a virus outbreak in the first place. Maybe these PC owners are to blame.

Whoever you decide to blame, don’t incur the costs involved with moving to a new hosting provider before you find out what your site was infected with and how those infections occurred. You might be barking up the wrong tree.

I’ll tell you, the cybercriminals are to blame.

They’re the people who write and distribute viruses, malware and malscripts.

Cybercriminals (some call them hackers) want to control as many computers as they possibly can. They don’t care if it’s a computer for a university or if it’s the computer of a new Internet start-up company. One compromised computer looks just the same as another.

Compromised computers make up their inventory.

You know what a hacker calls an uninfected computer – opportunity!

Their digital assets are the computers they control. Often times some of their inventory of infected computers gets rented out to other cybercriminals. This provides them with a source of income.

If you really need to blame someone, blame the hackers, or the international cyber laws, or the world economy. Just don’t blame the hosting providers.

Hosting providers provide a very valuable service. Their margins are squeezed tighter and tighter as it seems everybody thinks it’s a great idea to enter the hosting industry. The good hosting providers work hard for their customers. They depend on customer retention and acquisition – just like every other business. They do the best they can with what they have.

The only thing a hosting provider could do to prevent these gumblar, martuz and iframe infections is to block all FTP traffic. Then you would have a very good reason to blame them for something, but you still wouldn’t be able to justify blaming them for the rash of website infections.

It simply isn’t their fault.

Let me know your thoughts on this. Who would you blame if your site got hacked? Who did you blame if your site was already hacked?

Working with a website owner recently, we came across a new method of delivering infectious code (drive-by downloads) – at least it’s a method we’ve never seen before.

The scenario: Website owner gets the email from Google telling them their website is serving up malscripts to visitors and adds “This website can harm your computer” to all their SERPs. The website owner can’t find the malscript anywhere.

We scan their site and find nothing. Our scanning spiders their site, all links and even spiders the sites they link to.

Someone from another vendor says they found malware on a webpage that we didn’t even see. I start screaming “Why didn’t we find this page?” We try to manually download the page and we get a 404 error – page not found.

Turns out, the page didn’t even exist. We try to access the non-existent webpage with a sandboxed browser (sandboxed means it’s a system that can’t be infected due to all the security measures we’ve taken. It also records any attempted file changes, registry changes, etc.).

Bam! We see in the 404 error page that there’s some redirect code in there trying to access martuz.cn. Interesting.

We look at the address bar in our browser and see that it didn’t redirect to a custom 404 error page, it still shows the URL we typed in with the john_doe.html page at the end. We know from our scan that this client is running their website on an Apache 2.0 server.

Our research showed that in the Apache installation folder under a sub-folder of “error”, the HTTP_NOT_FOUND file had been modified and the malscript added.

Which begs the question, why would a cybercriminal go through all that trouble to only deliver the martuz.cn malscript to people who type in a non-existent webpage?

Not sure on that one.

We also found these files had been added to the default directory on the webserver:

bad_gateway.html

bad_request.html

forbidden.html

internal_server_error.html

method_not_allowed.html

not_acceptable.html

not_found.html

not_implemented.html

precondition_failed.html

proxy_authentication_required.html

request-uri_too_long.html

unauthorized.html

unsupported_media_type.html

Each of these pages looked like the default Apache error pages but with the martuz.cn malscript inserted between the closing HEAD tag and the opening BODY tag.

We found that Apache uses one of 4 options when handling error responses:

output a simple hardcoded error message

output a customized message

redirect to a local URL-path to handle the problem/error

redirect to an external URL to handle the problem/error

It didn’t appear to be redirecting as the URL in the address bar was still what we had entered. So we eliminated options 3 & 4.

At first when we saw the malscript only being delivered with 404 responses, we thought that maybe there must be some line in the httpd.conf file like:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

But there was no such entry in the httpd.conf file. It was definitely the default Apache error page with the martuz malscript inserted.

Further investigation found our theory was correct.

Lesson: When trying to find all the infectious pages on your site, don’t overlook the non-existent webpages as well. In this particular case, those were the only files serving infectious code.

What the cybercriminals are doing is finding legitimate websites they can hack and replacing any pdf files with their infectious pdf’s. Anyone who opens that pdf, either on screen or by downloading it and then opening it, will be subjected to this exploit and could face infection.Some websites have various forms they use for reports, registrations or any of a number of uses.

Frequently the infected webpage is designed to open automatically when you visit the page. Rarely will the website owner know they have an infectious website. Often times the infectious website won’t actually contain the malicious code. The webpage will have a line of javascript that downloads the malicious code from some server in a land far far away.

I usually hear people saying, “I scanned my website with 5 different anti-virus programs and nothing was detected.”

While this doesn’t hurt, rarely will this action find the infected webpage because only the javascript code that “reaches” out to the far away server is on the webpage – and it’s heavily encrypted to avoid easy detection. The actual virus or other malicious code is located on their server and often it’s polymorphic – it changes it’s shape and size for each time it’s downloaded on a user’s PC. This “strategy” helps the infectious code in evading detection by most anti-virus programs.

Hacking of a legitimate website is nothing new in distributing malware as I’ve written about numerous times in other blog postings here.

It’s amazing how certain hackings follow the news. It was just a couple days ago when I was watching the news on TV (yes that old, outdated media) and learned that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were going to get back together for a “reunion” tour.

The website hacking could have been purely coincidental, as the toolkit planted on his website – Luckysploit, has been used in many, many recent website malware distributions. It could be that the cybercriminals behind this exploit just happened to find this site vulnerable to their recent attack. I believe it’s irrelevant how or why, their timing was impeccable.

This is another example of social engineering used successfully to infect more computers.

Think of the millions of Beatle’s fans (my father-in-law is one of them – a fan not a virus victim) hearing about this reunion and flocking to Mr. McCartney’s website to find out where their concerts will be performed only to find out at the next anti-virus scan that they’ve been compromised by a bank login and password stealing virus.

The nerve of these hackers. Using something so “in the news” to lure millions of people to infectious websites that have been planted with malicious code, appearing to be legitimate websites, for the sole purpose of delivering a virus that is currently evading detection by many anti-virus programs.

Is there no shame?

This attack is being carried out by the Zeus botnet. Yes while everyone was watching out for Conficker, many forgot about the other botnets out there.

It’s easy to spot the infectious malware code in the “source” of the web page. All you have to do is look for something that’s impossible to read because it is encrypted and obfuscated to avoid easy detection. Luckily for us, we don’t look for specific infections while scanning websites. Our systems are based on any changes to a website. We pay close attention to changes that include specific keywords, but our alert system is based on any changes made to a website.

Once again the cybercriminals use a popular event to spread their malware. This particular infection will steal banking credentials which are then sold on the open black market. This is one of the cybercriminals profit centers. They have many.

Be careful when using the Internet, you never know if you’re getting more than you bargained for.

I’ll admit that even though we really didn’t think anything malicious was going to happen, we did add a Conficker scanner to The Box (our security appliance at www.ebasedsecurity.com) so we could scan our client’s systems.

Let me explain our thinking. We’ve been following Conficker all along the way. From the first strain to the most recent, we’ve been watching with our honeypots – collecting data and samples and determining what could happen. We’ve seen the changes, what it does and how it communicates with it’s “mother ship” waiting for it’s next set of instructions.

When news of Conficker hit mass media, (60 Minutes did a piece on it) our non-technical gut feeling was that the cybercriminals wouldn’t actually do anything malicious with their code. There was too much public awareness.

Keep in mind that if they had, they could have created some real havoc on the Internet. Some experts (my Dad’s definition of an expert is: an ex is a has been and a spirt is a drip under pressure) estimate that anywhere from 10 million to 100 million PCs are infected with Conficker.

If a cybercriminal or a group of cybercriminals have remote control of that many PCs and they decided to launch an attack against some main Internet servers, they could overload them with so much bogus traffic as to basically eliminate them from accessibility.

Now, if they attacked the main DNS servers on the Internet (the servers that convert domain names to IP addresses) could they slow down or shut-down the Internet? Possibly.

However, nothing happened.

Or did it?

What actually happened might be exactly what the cybercriminals wanted.

How many of you did Google searches for Conficker over the past week (the week before April 1)?

Many, many (our research showed that over 1.7 million ) people searched for “conficker scanner” or “conficker removal”, “remove conficker”, “find conficker” and numerous other terms.

Did you realize that many of the search results were offering solutions that actually infected your PC? Many of the websites that were displayed as a result of those search terms were created by the cybercriminals!

Could this have been the real intention of the cybercriminals? If so, this could be the biggest social engineering hack of all time. We examined many of these sites and found a number of them (64%) were selling Conficker scanners and removal tools. All of these “tools” we found were actually RATs (Remote Access Trojans) which actually provided the cybercriminals with remote control of the PC it was installed on.

And, “they” (the cybercriminals) got you to pay for it!

Are these guys geniuses or what?

Many of the sites that weren’t selling bogus removal tools tried to infect any PC that visited their site. These infected webpage sites used a variety of sneaky methods to infect PCs. One instance we found actually tried 17 different attacks on all the PCs visiting it’s infectious website.

If you’ve been following us, you know that legitimate websites serving malware are increasing. This coupled with infected websites serving malware makes the Internet a very dangerous place.

Fortunately for all of our clients with The Box, they don’t have to worry about things like this because The Box doesn’t allow downloads from non-whitelisted websites. What a concept.

Cybercriminals are using cleverly crafted SPAM messages to get you to click on a link that supposedly takes you to a Reuter’s video of bomb blasts in your area.

I say cleverly crafted because the email will change based on where your IP address is. For instance, I received one with a subject line of, “Are you and your friends okay?”.

When I clicked on the link (yes as part of my research), I saw a webpage that showed the Reuter’s logo with, “Powerful explosion burst in Chicago this morning”. There’s a graphic to see the video with text below that reads, “At least 12 people have been killed and more than 40 wounded in a bomb blast near market in Chicago. Authorities suggested that explosion was caused by “dirty” bomb. Police said the bomb was detonated from close by using electric cables.”

Scanning through our logs of SPAM for our clients using The Box, we’ve been able to see how the message refers to a different major nearby city depending on where the client receives their email.

The video will install some malware via a download. We’ve identified the trojan as a strain of Waled or Waledac depending on your AV.

Other subject lines we’ve seen are: “Take Care!”, “At least 18 killed in your city” (which is interesting as all the emails we’ve seen state that 12 have been killed), “I hope you are not in the city now”, “Bomb blast near you” and a host of others.

We’ve reported before on how clever cybercriminals are to use hype and fear as examples of social engineering to get people to want to click on their links. When clicked, systems become infected.

Cyber threats such as these will continue as long as they’re successful at hooking at least a few million people. Hackers are making good money through their craft and will not stop. Using extreme fear and directing visitors to infectious websites will always be a tactic they pull out every once in awhile. This will die down and then in another few months they’ll use some other alarmist strategy and infect some more computers.

Continuing on from Round 1, I decided to take a step further and show you exactly how susceptible you are to a socially engineered infection through Twitter. Actually it’s more an attack through TinyURL.com, but since Twitter automatically converts URLs in your Tweets (ugh!), it is an attack via Twitter.

For this example, let’s say that a hacker wants to construct a website that references some research on Harvard’s website. It would be on a topic that is of high interest at the moment.

First the hacker (cybercriminal) would use Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) to see what’s hot. As of today (03/02/2009) the list is as follows:

granville waiters

nyc doe

wavy tv 10

new york city department of education

dr. seuss birthday

opm.gov

wvec

nyc public school closings

nyc board of education

newport news public schools

These are the top 10.

Nothing in there that is really eye catching that covers a broad scope of people. I’ll use dr. seuss birthday.

Our cybercriminal would construct some basic information about how Harvard University has created this research paper detailing the events behind Dr. Seuss stories. Our cybercriminal needs to have something that already indicates some legitimacy and some validation. For this scenario I’m using Harvard University for 2 reasons; they already carry a huge credibility factor and they have a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that let’s me use their URL for redirection.

The cybercriminal would take the XSS URL and instead of redirecting the reader to another page inside of Harvard’s website, use it to redirect the unsuspecting reader to their malicious website.

With TinyURL.com’s preview function I could see the exact URL of the above TinyURL. Maybe you’d see the redirection at the end and maybe not.

Now, our crafty cybercriminal knows that TinyURL.com has this preview function, so he (we’ll assume a male hacker) converts the URL of his malicious website to one you can’t recognize. This is called URL obfuscation (I love using that word).

This would take my URL of http://www.wewatchyourwebsite.com and convert it to: %68%74%74%70%3a%2f%2f%77%77%77%2e%77%65%77%61%74%63%68%79%6f%75%72%77%65%62%73%69%74%65%2e%63%6f%6d

If you saw this by itself, hopefully you’d be suspicious and avoid the urge to click on it. However, when used at the backend of an already long URL, you might just throw caution into the wind and click away.

Go ahead and click on that to see what I mean. As of today, that XSS on Harvard’s site has not been fixed so it will load their frame, but inside will be our home page. Keep in mind that even with TinyURL.com’s preview function, you would only see the obfuscated URL with all the percent signs. This might give you a false sense of security and decide to trust your “gut” and go for it. That’s what the cybercriminal is hoping for.

Obviously our website isn’t going to infect your computer, however, if the redirection URL were to take you to the cybercriminals infectious webpage, you’d be infected and not even know it.

To recap, the purpose of this information is to show you the steps a cybercriminal would follow to use social engineering to spread their malware. They would use Google Trends to find a hot topic, they would use the credibility of some other site, Harvard in this example, they would use obfuscation to hide their work from people who know what to look for and they would use Twitter or some other social networking site to find as many people as they could.

As stated earlier, this isn’t so much a vulnerability of Twitter as it is with TinyURL.com, but since Twitter uses TinyURL.com, it does reflect back on them.

My first review will be Twitter. I selected Twitter because it’s widely used and even easier for social engineering than some of the others.

First a little background on Twitter. Many people categorize Twitter as a “micro” blog. This means you can post short (140 character) messages that communicate your current thoughts, actions, wants or needs.

From their website Nicholas Carr describes it as “the telegraph system of Web 2.0″ while the New York Times states, “It’s one of the fastest growing phenomena on the Internet.”

The first thing I noticed about Twitter is that most links posted by members are the shortened version of a full URL. Some of the more populare sites for these services are:

Using these shortened URLs on Twitter allows members to include some description with their link.

I’ve always had a problem with these shortened URLs. Having seen numerous SPAM messages with embedded shortened URLs in order to evade detection, I set out to investigate further.

You never know what the ultimate destination is when clicking on these links. You could easily be led to an infectious webpage. Infectious websites are one of the most popular tactics of cybercriminals to deliver their malware.

I scanned our SPAM traps for messages that included these shortened URLs. I used one of our secured systems to see where these links ultimately delivered my browser.

Much to my surprise, all of the links that used TinyURL.com delivered the following message:

“The TinyURL (shows link) you visited was used by it’s creator in violation of our terms of use. TinyURL has a strict no abuse policy and we apologize for the intrusion this user has caused you. Such violation of our terms of use include:

Spam – Unsolicited Bulk E-mail

Fraud or Money Making scams

Malware

or any other use that is illegal”

This tells me that they’re either policing their links or that they actually take action on misuse of their service – this is awesome. I suggest that before clicking on any TinyURL, replace tinyurl.com with preview.tinyurl.com. For instance if you see a link like: http://www.tinyurl.com/8888, before clicking on it, change the URL to: http://preview.tinyurl.com/8888. The resulting webpage will show you exactly where the link will take you with a link that says, “Proceed to this site.”

I know this is somewhat of an inconvenience, but so is having your PC sending millions of SPAM messages after you’ve been added to a huge botnet.

You see, with any security situation, you always have to consider the risk involved when the potentially weakest link is the responsibility of someone else.

With these shortened URLs, you’re depending on the URL shortening service to provide you with some level of protection.

One other service I investigated, SnipURL.com clearly states on their website:

“SnipURL has a number of operational functions in place to protect the confidentiality of information. However, perfect security on the Internet does not exist, and SnipURL does not warrant that its site is impenetrable or invulnerable to hackers.”

At least they admit that perfect security does not exist, but don’t think that you’re safe clicking on a shortened URL link.

I believe that any free service is going to be exploited by cybercriminals. I’ve seen many times where even fee based services are abused by cybercriminals.

You had better fully trust the person or organization behind the Twitter posting before you blindly click on a shortened link on their site – because you’re either relying on the poster or Twitter. If that little bird in your head is telling you to be careful, you shouldn’t be clicking on it no matter how important you think it might be.

Have you had situations of a security breach on Twitter? If so, let us know by posting a comment.